Solar Dublin High School groundbreaking tomorrow

Dublin gets the jump on the rest of Georgia again:
Dublin High School will get a megawatt of solar electricity
through a lease agreement with a private company
using local government bonds to get around Georgia’s special financing problem.

Dublin High School of Dublin City Schools will soon implement
1 megawatt of solar energy.

The 4,000 panel solar power plant will be the largest in Central
Georgia and is expected to save the school 40 percent in energy
costs.

Dublin City Schools Superintendent Chuck Ledbetter told 13WMAZ, “The
facility will be built and owned by private business and the school
system will lease the solar power plant, saving us money in energy
costs.”

The original plan was developed more than 15-months ago by German
based MAGE SOLAR, which has a plant located in Laurens County.

Please join Dublin Schools Superintendent Dr. Chuck Ledbetter,
Public Service Commissioners: Laurens “Bubba” McDonald, Doug
Everett, and Tim Echols for a groundbreaking ceremony for the new
Solar PV-Project at Dublin City High School on Monday, March 11th
from 3pm to 4:15pm at the Dublin High School Auditorium located at
1127 Hillcrest Parkway, Dublin, Georgia.

I’m all for GaSU’s blows-against-the-empire efforts to go around
Georgia Power in deploying solar power (unless they end up interfering
with distributed rooftop solar), but I wonder if secrecy and confusion
are really helping, considering actually none of this seems to be a secret.

Dr. Smith last year already set up a
Georgia Energy Trust Fund
with bonds whose interest goes to a county, so as to decrease expenses.
Sure, those are Georgia bonds, bought by Dr. Smith’s company.
This Dublin deal uses bonds floated by the local governments.

Valdosta or Lowndes County could do a loan program for real clean
renewable energy! or the Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial
Authority (VLCIA) could do that using some of its $15 million in
bonds and other debt, assuming it hasn’t already spent all of it on
locking up land.

Or Georgia Power or Colquitt Electric could do that,
given that dozens of other electric utilities around the state already do.

Maybe some of the 577 acres of mostly unused land VLCIA bought with
$15 million in bonds could be sold, since many of the lots are too
small to trade to incoming industries….

You could help lead the region in the fastest growing industry in
the world. With two solar PV manufacturers in Georgia plus south
Georgia sun, rooftop solar can bring jobs from delivery, to
installation, to architects, to professors to study renewable energy
throughout the region.

Now I didn’t write those things about bonds because I’m a financial expert:
I’m not.
I wrote them because they’re so obvious anybody familiar with local
governments already knows them.

Now once again I admire Robert Green’s demonstrated ability to
get around that antique 1973 Georgia
Territorial Electric Service Act
that is the source of all this trouble with solar financing.
And yes, he seems quite good with financial projection spreadsheets.
But there’s nothing special about the general idea of local governments
floating bonds to support local services.

And I must once again applaud Dublin and Laurens County for doing
what Valdosta and Lowndes County hadn’t even thought of.

But I still don’t see how GaSU’s plan to form a solar monopoly
for Georgia or even this Greenavations plan for high schools
addresses
the need for jobs in rural Georgia
and the need for electrical bills reduced at houses and businesses.
Sure, reducing how much revenue a school district needs to raise
will eventually maybe lower local taxes.
But there are much more direct paths like what Houston is doing with
weatherizing, insulating, and solarizing all houses in a neighborhood
that agree to get it done.
How does the GaSU approach help with that?
And if GaSU actually succeeds in establishing a solar utility monopoly
for Georgia, won’t that impede rooftop solar?